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These days the battle between digital snapshot camera manufacturers seems to be less about picture quality and more about design and features. With all the major players now offering high megapixel cameras in compact sizes with more or less similar optical capabilities (a slightly wider lens here, a faintly higher level of magnification there), the question many consumers end up asking is which camera can do what neat-o extra thing, and how cool does it look doing it?
One of Sony's most recent point-and-shoot models, the six-megapixel Cyber-shot DSCT9, distinguishes itself by providing practical features most casual photographers will be sure to appreciate.
For starters, it sports a big, beautiful 6.2-centimetre LCD that fills three quarters of the back side of the camera. It's remarkably bright—even in direct daylight—and makes reviewing pictures a pleasure as opposed to an eye-squinting annoyance.
The T9 is, in fact, a great way to show pictures to your friends on the go. Not only does the LCD deliver excellent viewing angles from left, right, above, and below, it also offers a sleek slideshow mode that comes complete with your choice of four musical soundtracks.
Your friends viewing the slideshow will be just as likely to comment on the camera itself as they are the pictures. Its brushed metal casing, sliding lens cover, and svelte dimensions make the T9 nothing if not only aesthetically pleasing. Still, it could have benefited from a few ergonomic improvements. Using both the zoom and shutter release buttons while holding the camera with one hand is tricky at best, and I often found myself confusing the right directional button on the back of the camera with a piece of similarly shaped metal used to tether the wrist strap just above it.
Casual photographers will appreciate the T9's 58MB of onboard memory--room enough to store about 23 pictures taken at the camera's highest resolution, more at a lower resolution settings, which are good enough for email or web posts--but 58MB isn't really enough storage at the end of the day, so you'll most likely want to use a removable memory card as well. That or unload the thing so often you'll think its got the digital equivalent of BPH. Still, 58MB onboard does serve as a nice little bonus and certainly comes in handy when your memory card is full. Just bear in mind that if you pick up a T9 you'll also need to also pick up one of Sony's proprietary Memory Stick Duos, not to be confused with the SD Card format that most other manufactures employ (SD Cards and Memory Stick Duos serve the same purpose, but only Sony sticks fit into the T9, while SD cards work in most other camera brands and can be interchanged).
Still, back on the bright side, technophobes will appreciate the T9's wonderfully simple interface. Touch the menu button to call up a series of standard presets geared for common shooting environments. If you choose Auto, the only variables to play with include recording mode (normal, burst, and multi-burst) and basic camera setup features. For those less afraid of getting down and dirty with their photography, choosing a preset other than Auto opens up a wide range of features to fine tune each exposure, including ISO, white balance, and focus options.
And that brings us to the T9's picture quality. Sony's partnership with Carl Zeiss has given their cameras and camcorders a reputation for delivering excellent image quality, and the T9 lives up to that reputation. Other than the lens being a bit on the narrow side (which might make it tough to fit a large group of people into a single shot in cramped indoor environments), there's not much to complain about. Color reproduction is terrific, and with Sony's lauded Super SteadyShot image stabilization feature turned on you'll see a noticeable impact in the reduction of blurriness in your photos, especially in low light environments. The only way to significantly improve upon the T9's picture quality would be to move to a camera with a larger, longer lens, but to do that you'd need to sacrifice the advantages afforded by a credit card-sized device, the first and foremost being portability—typically an important consideration for casual photographers.
All told, the $499 CDN T9 is a solid contender in the higher bracket snapshot camera market. It goes to great lengths to make the digital photography experience as clean, accessible, and fun as possible, presents itself in a sleek and stylish package, and does it all without sacrificing functionality or picture quality.
Reviewed: May. 23, 2006
Type: Cameras
From: Sony Electronics
Pictures
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